Running a Support Community, I think it is valuable to find out if people got a useful answer to their question. If they return and mark it as assumed answered or correct answer then other folk will have a better idea if it is something they should try. Of course, people do not do this. If they have an answer, they are off working on the next issue. If it did not work, they go off and try another way to find a solution.

As a way to encourage folks to return and mark it, I was thinking of a campaign/contest. I want to point up that marking it is a way to recognize and say thanks to the folks providing help. I was planning on handing out T-shirts and creating recognition boxes to showcase the people marking the questions and the people providing an answer.

What do you think? Can we shift behavior and get folks to mark them? Is pointing out that this is a way to says Thanks (plus the chance to get a cool t-shirt) enough motivation?

Anyone else had success with this?

Thanks

Mike

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Categories: Best Practices and Guidelines, Community Management, Community Marketing

We are planning to have our more experienced Engineers look for unanswered questions and see if a viable solution was posted. If so they will mark it as assumed answered with a note telling the user that they did so and to let us know if that actually did not resolve their issue. We are just starting out so I am hoping we can set a trend in the beginning that users will catch on to before we get overwhelmed with traffic. I'm sure we will one day reach a point where we will not have the resources to do this on every unanswered question.

I'm also hoping that our "How to use this Community" video will re-enforce the fact that we want people to flag correct and helpful answers by highlighting that in the video.

I'm not sure if this will do the trick, but time will tell as we grow. I will be very interested to see what everyone else does to address this.

I just realized that once something is marked as "Assumed Answered" there is no way for the author or an admin to unmark it without a database change. I am baffled as to why, but figured I would respond back to this post to let people know so it can be considered in their decision. In any event please go vote this idea up: Allow Admin to Unmark as Assumed Answered

Running a Support Community, I think it is valuable to find out if people got a useful answer to their question. If they return and mark it as assumed answered or correct answer then other folk will have a better idea if it is something they should try. Of course, people do not do this. If they have an answer, they are off working on the next issue. If it did not work, they go off and try another way to find a solution.

As a way to encourage folks to return and mark it, I was thinking of a campaign/contest. I want to point up that marking it is a way to recognize and say thanks to the folks providing help. I was planning on handing out T-shirts and creating recognition boxes to showcase the people marking the questions and the people providing an answer.

What do you think? Can we shift behavior and get folks to mark them? Is pointing out that this is a way to says Thanks (plus the chance to get a cool t-shirt) enough motivation?

Anyone else had success with this?

Thanks

Mike

Mike, I ran the support community for our company for 4 years before moving over to marketing. One thing I did was create an "Expert" program. I appointed 10 power users as "Experts" when it came to our products , created a private group for them to hang out in which allowed me to sort of preach our internal support philosophy to them including the importance of evangelizing how to get the most out of the community. What happened was that I won over 10 very smart and experienced users of our products simply by giving them a badge and engaging with them. Now, I have "experts" preaching the benefits of marking posts as answered, how to find helpful FAQ's, and basically how to just get the most out of SBS.

I did give them some other perks like discounts on gear, beta test privileges, etc. but what I've discovered is that simple engagement and providing them with the feeling that they are part of our family (and they indeed are) was the most effective way of getting them to spread the good word and continuing to be helpful members to other less experienced users within our community. It works. Believe me.

A timely discussion as this topic arose today. Looking at the answers so far, there does not appear to be an automated method to flag "unanswered"queries? It sounds like manual search is standard. Please advise if there is a filter identifying "open"queries. Thanks!

Using Jive5, I put a content widget on our Space page (and one on a Secret Community Mgr group) for Unanswered Questions. I think you can configure the number of items to show in the widget as well, but it calls attention the items that still need answers.

In 4.5 there is a widget or unanswered questions. The issue is that these show questions (need to be marked as a question) with no replies. Only the person asking really knows if you have provided an answer. Not perfect but a good starting point.

You're right, most members will not come back and accept their answer as correct. What I have done in the past that seems to work well is I have created an email template that gets sent to everyone who creates a question asking them if they got their answer. The marketing automation tool I was using in the past put the URL to the question in the email so the member could be directed back to their question- but if you do not have a tool that does this you can always do it manually. This is also a great way to get people back into the Community and hopefully ask or answer another question!

Yes I am manually going in and adding the statement as a reply to the person that asked the question. Looking at the March data, I see an increase in Assumed Answers over Feb. Will look at April to see if this is working.

Also select one each month and highlight the people involved as example. Also give them a T-shirt.

Your solution is excellent! So I take you built a custom email template and corresponding plugin. Correct? Did you add System Properties that allow you to set the frequency of when the notice would be sent out and the number of days from the original / last question post?

I wish it was that automated. Since we are in the test and adjust phase, I go in each day and look. The numbers are still low enough to make this manageable. My next phase is to get my internal SMEs that are monitoring to start adding this, but for now the focus is to get them to provide answers.

Not all the ones that have sat for a week have an answer, so automation at this point would not be the right approach. My screening also provides me with ones where the conversation stopped and I need to prod the SME to finish it.

Once we are a well oiled machine we can look at adding a custom change.